


Swept Up

by somekindofseizure



Series: IWTB William AU [1]
Category: The X-Files, The X-Files: I Want To Believe (2008)
Genre: AU, F/M, IWTB, MSR, Piano, William - Freeform, jealous scully, numbered prompts, prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 20:00:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6534394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a prompt:  "Wait a minute... are you jealous?"</p><p>This takes place in an AU before/around "I Want to Believe."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swept Up

William was shrieking with laughter.  Sara, the first love of his life, was showering him with attention, kneeling to clip his nails as he floated airplane-style in his father’s arms.  Mulder wondered if there was any adult equivalent of the rapture a child experienced when caught off guard and swept up into the air.

The giggling was contagious and Mulder began to chuckle too.  Sara smiled, letting Will tug her blonde braid as she wielded a tiny scissor.

“Ahhhh, isn’t this better? _This_ is how they’re supposed to be.  Now you can play with your wrists up and be _a virtuoso_ ,” Sara said theatrically to William, who didn’t seem to notice her hamming it up.  Nail grooming was the very bane of his existence.  But the insistence of his beloved piano teacher plus a little surprise airplane-position seemed to do the trick.

The task of hiring the piano teacher had fallen to Mulder.  Scully had wanted to be there, then sighed guiltily as the hospital called. Mulder’s idea of a piano teacher, like all his ideas, was a little overly-romantic.

“It doesn’t have to be an old man with white hair, a black velvet vest and a monocle.  Just meet her,” Scully had insisted as she left him waiting to meet Sara.  The girl was just a recent music school grad with little teaching experience, but William immediately liked her, and she was willing to come all the way out to their house, even though there were no neighboring children to make the trip worthwhile. There were no neighbors, period. 

Will was very take-it-or-leave-it about the piano.  But his feelings on Sara were another story.  He’d sit for her the whole lesson, peacocking the things he’d practiced (under threat of her approaching visit).  Apparently, he was even willing to have his nails cut for her.  So the piano lesson meant Mulder had a half hour every Tuesday to himself.

He used to start planning how to spend it on Monday:  read the paper, finish a book, organize his desk, clear out his email, shave, learn how to cook a real meal and stop skating by on pasta and frozen vegetables.  He would mentally unfold the blueprints of his best-laid plans as he let Sara in and got Will seated.

But as soon as he was alone, the plans went out the window.  He’d change his mind, feel the time was better spent thinking of Scully.  Missing her.  Staring out windows, leaning on countertops, running his hand across her pillow, trying to remember what she tasted like while her son pounded out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

When they’d moved in together, he thought he would get to see her every moment of every day.  Now he hardly saw her at all, except on Tuesdays, in his mind, when he saw her all kinds of places.  He saw her sitting on the countertop, kissing him over a cup of coffee, falling asleep on the porch swing while he rambled on, arguing on the couch about what to watch until they decided to have sex instead, her mouth pressed up against his arm so Will wouldn’t hear her moan.

Like everybody, they had problems – cancer chips, extraterrestrial abductions, governments dead-set on fucking their lives up – all fine.  But the idea that he would be at home on a Tuesday afternoon counting backward to the last time they’d made love?  He had never even bothered to be paranoid about it, that’s how far-fetched that had seemed.

Today his daydreaming was going to be delayed by five minutes.  Sara had been asking for Will’s nails to be trimmed for three weeks, but neither he nor Scully had managed to succeed.  Finally, this morning, Mulder had had a breakthrough; he learned the part Will hated about nail-cutting was the sound of the clippers.  So he found a sharp, quiet, little scissor in Scully’s nail polish drawer, handed it over to Sara and scooped Will up, holding him hostage in his favorite position.

“There we go!” she was saying as she finished up.  “It’s gonna be so nice to hear you play the song without your nails going clickety-click!” 

“Daaad, put me down,” Will said, suddenly serious, perhaps aware of his sliding dignity before Sara.  Mulder flipped him to his feet and went into the next room as Sara took her seat and patted the piano bench.

“Oh hi, you must be Dr. Scully,” he suddenly heard Sara say.  He assumed it was the mail lady, that Sara was mistaken.  

Mulder popped his head back into the room.  Sighting confirmed.  William was already hugging her at the hips.  Mulder smiled, patiently waiting to do the same.  Scully gave Will a squeeze and then shooed him back to the piano.

“Hi, nice to meet you,” she said to Sara, passing swiftly through the room and up the stairs, talking to Mulder over her shoulder.  “Let’s get out of Sara’s hair.  We don’t want to keep her here all afternoon.”

Mulder put a hand on his hip and sucked his teeth as he leaned on the bannister.  He hated when she took over like that.  She had no idea what “we” wanted to do anymore, because she was never there.  Actually, he felt like yeling up the steps, “we” just want to have an adult conversation and maybe hand over a spectacular orgasm to the woman “we” love.  

He tried not to be angry as he watched her click upstairs.  Things must have been very bad at work for her not to take her shoes off on the first floor. Maybe she’d lost a patient.  He took the stairs two at a time, sock-footed, following the intoxicating scent of Scully’s perfume soaked for a full day on her skin.

But at the top of the steps, he paused.  She was stomping around, her little bare feet grinding the floorboards.  Maybe some kind of body snatcher thing had happened. Scully’s anger was generally a slow burn to a simmer.  After a while, it either hissed out the sides or sometimes just evaporated altogether.  He heard her kick her shoes into the closet, skipping the part where she put them in the cute little shoe pockets he pretended to think were stupid.  She had all four burners on high heat.   _What the fuck happened today?_

He held onto the doorjamb for protection as he peeked his head in.  Her back was to him as she stretched her ribs up and tugged her shirt off.  On the bottom, she’d already changed into a tiny pair of old track shorts, cornflower blue with a white stripe up the side.   

Just to make things a little more complicated for him.

She pulled on a very old t-shirt, worn threadbare in small circles over her collarbone and belly button. He usually only saw her dressed like this after sex.  If he could make her come hard enough, she’d forgo the fancy pajamas.  Well, he certainly hadn’t gotten to do that lately.  But something had her unhinged.

 _Oh my God, she’s cheating on me._  He shook the thought out of his head quickly, telling himself only one of them could lose it at a time, and she had obviously called dibs.  He followed her into the bathroom.

“Scully?  Everything okay at work?”

She splashed water messily over her face.  The t-shirt clung to her skin in small spots where she’d gotten it wet.  He flexed his stomach muscles and smothered the twinge of a slow-forming erection. These days, he could think it away if he wanted to.

“Fine.  I was able to get off early.”  

He nodded suspiciously as she reached up to the on top of the medicine cabinet, took something, and went back to the bedroom.   She began to rummage through her nightstand drawer.  He stood ambivalently behind her, torn precariously between the magnetic force of her little shorts and a healthy fear for his life.

“So that’s why she comes all the way out here,” she said suddenly with the eerie control of someone who’d been mentally calculating a sentence for several minutes. 

“What?” 

“She doesn’t come all the way out here because she likes Will or she needs thirty bucks.  She has a crush on you.”  Her hand came out of the drawer with a crushed old half empty pack of cigarettes.  He blinked hard and stretched his brow, trying to believe what he was seeing.  Scully, home during daylight, dressed like a sexy sorority girl, and acting like a crazy person.

“What the…”  He started to laugh. It was ridiculous, adorable and completely unacceptable.  “What the _fuck_ is going on, Scully?”  

She slipped her hand under the dish she sometimes burned church-y incense in, came out with a lighter.

“Hey stop it, that’s not funny…”  He despised and feared cigarettes and she knew it.  

She dug her fingers under the window pane and pulled it up, talking to him over her shoulder. “You know, it’s not like I never thought to try the scissors before.  I just don’t think it’s that important that the kid have perfectly shorn fingernails for every lesson.  He’s not Mozart, he’s seven.”

“Don’t you dare light that thing, I swear to God,” he said, taking two cautious steps toward her.  She had squeaked the window halfway up the frame and was perching in the gap, one knee bent up underneath it.  The other foot was inside, on the floor.  Her pink toenail polish was chipped.  

“Or you swear to God, what?”

He didn’t know.  He tried to think of an honest answer.   _Or I won’t want to fuck you… as much… as I did five minutes ago?_

She stared at him defiantly and finally put the butt of the cigarette to her lips, daring him to come get it.  When he didn’t, she leaned her face out the window and tried to light it, but thankfully, it was breezy and she was out of practice.

“How long have you had those?  What if _your son_ went in that drawer?” he said, knowing he was dipping into very chilly waters.

“Then he would also find – _shut the door_ – then he would also find five hundred dollars in emergency cash, a harlequin romance novel, some very dirty old love notes from you, and two vibrators,” she said sharply. She dangled the cigarette-holding wrist out the window and looked at him, holding up the tiny key.   _Oh, that’s what was on top of the cabinet._   

“It has a _lock_ on it, Mulder.  Or maybe you think Sara would make a better mother than I would.”

“What is your _problem_?  You come home early just to yell and smoke?”

A cold gust moved through the rusty trees outside and passed through her, turning her to him like the blade of a windmill.  Red, wild strands whipped around her finger like a pole as she tried to keep them out of her face.  The color of her eyes wavered as they daintily made an effort to match the color of her shorts.  Her nipples were impressively provoked and visible under the thin grey layer of deconstructed cotton.  With the cigarette out of sight, it was absolutely impossible to be angry with her.  

Suddenly he remembered this behavior from somewhere.  He hadn’t seen it since, oh, maybe 1993 or something?  But he was pretty sure this was it.

“Wait a minute.  Are you… jealous?” he said, the tone of his voice rising in hopeful disbelief.  She scoffed out the window, as if this didn’t even deserve a response, and with a strong suck, finally got the cigarette lit.  In a matter of three wide strides, he had her wrist in his hand, and shortly thereafter the offending death stick was simmering in a stale mug of water.

“Are you?” he repeated emphatically.  She hugged her knee and rested her mouth against it, broken and beautiful, her eyes frozen as he sat slowly on the other side of the windowsill.  She began to stammer in a tone of voice so unnerving that he didn’t even really want to let her finish.  But he knew he needed to hear it.

“I’m not… jealous, I just… When I saw her looking at you like that… I _never_ get to look at you like that, I don’t even have the fucking _time_ to look at you like that anymore… I don’t even have time to do _my_ nails, much less William’s.  Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve had sex?”

“Three weeks and four days.”

“Yes,” she said, two short bursts of laughter garbled through her tears and snot.  He knew the feeling. They had both been counting, after it seemed like so long since they had _both_ done _anything_.  It was always _you take Will here, I’ll drop this off there, you clean that, and I’ll dry these_ ; their domestic success was based on divide-and-conquer.   At this cost, he wasn’t sure what “success” meant.

“God, this is embarrassing,” she sighed.  She let her knee fall open, half out the window, a tendon rising and forming a smooth ledge at the top edge of her inner thigh.  He stared momentarily with shallow breath at the edge of her shorts, which had risen up toward her pelvic joint, revealing a little bit of that soap-dish indentation he loved.  She used to make him practice slipping the crux of his hand over it without tickling her. 

“Scully, I don’t know what you think you saw, but I know it’s not whatever that is, because there’s definitely nothing going on worth hanging out a window and smoking a cigarette over.  And by the way, we’re throwing these out.”

“I just suddenly realized, I’m never… here.  But you’re here… and there’s this beautiful girl who makes our son laugh… and… and…” She was starting to cry again.  “Cuts his nails.”

“Scully, did you see how he lit up when you came in?”

“I’m not worried about _him.”_  She looked at him with wide, confessional eyes, thick lashes flicking away tears.  Mulder nearly melted outside into the potted plants when he realized what she meant.

“The entire 2007 Sports Illustrated calendar could be down there, and I’d be here.  With you.  Particularly in these shorts.”

She wiped her face on the inside neck of the shirt, a sliver of pale, flat stomach making itself available for the narrowest window of time.  

“I’m sorry.  I lost it.  I’m so tired,” she said, pulling her face up out of the fabric.

He put an arm around her hips and pulled, the worn terry fabric under her bottom sliding against the fresh coat of paint he’d recently applied.  He folded her leg in and shut the window.  She took little fingersful of his t-shirt as she climbed into his lap. Her knees would be red and bruised from the windowsill tomorrow morning.

“How much longer do we have, twenty minutes?” she said in that breathy voice, the one she never used anymore, the one that made him instantly hard.

“Maybe a little extra. Because she likes me,” he said softly. She shoved his shoulders against the thick glass and he ran his hands up the back of her cold thighs.  He felt a familiar old thrill as his palms wrapped up under the back of her shorts and pressed into her soft skin.  She was hovering, teasing – her lips just barely against his, the tips of her breasts at the edge of his chest.

It took just the tip of one finger inside her and she collapsed toward him, humming like an ignition into his ear.  He turned his lips against her face, nudging her back right in front of him, right where he could see her, right where he could kiss her. 

“I’m glad we don’t have neighbors,” she said as she reached for the hem of her shirt with her elbow dug into her waist.  

“If we have time afterwards, I’ll paint your toenails.”

“I don’t want to have time afterwards.” 

Their lips finally opened and met with the fury of three and a half weeks absence, plus one piano teacher, ten fingernails, a few coarse words, and a close-call with a cigarette.  He slipped his tongue into her mouth and remembered all of a sudden how she tasted.

 _This_ , he thought, this was what it must feel like to be caught off guard and swept into the air.


End file.
